Atomic Power

Atomic power unleashed it full might on August 6th
1945 when the "Enola Gay"
flew to its target Hiroshima. On board was one bomb
- "Little Boy". It had enormous explosive power, more than anybody on
board the ‘plane could ever have imagined.
Hiroshima was flattened. On the 9th
August, the same destruction happened to Nagasaki. This time, the bomb was known
as "Fat Man". Why did both bombs have such colossal explosive power?

Scientists - especially in Germany - had been working on
the potential of atomic power for some while. In 1938, a major advance was made
by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry
in Berlin. These men experimented by bombarding uranium with neutrons. What they
had found was that the uranium divided into two roughly equal parts. They called
this process "fission".

Atomic fission had the ability to unleash vast amounts of
energy. The first man to realise this was Leo Szilard - a Hungarian physicist.
Szilard believed that if you could control atomic fission, you could boil water
to create steam to drive the generators in power stations. If you deliberately
set out not to control atomic fission, you could create a vast explosive
force which, Szilard believed, could destroy a city. In later years, Szilard
said that "there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed
for grief."

Many scientists knew that Nazi Germany had an unhealthy
interest in atomic power and a letter from Albert Einstein - a scientist who had
fled Nazi Germany to live in America - to President Roosevelt of America
persuaded the American president to set up the "Manhattan Project".

The man in charge of reactor development was Enrico Fermi.
He was a brilliant physicist who, ironically at the age of 25, nearly did what
Hahn and Strassmann had done but four years earlier in 1934 - discover fission.
He had fled from Fascist Italy as he had a Jewish wife. They emigrated to
America.

As part of the Manhattan team, Fermi constructed his Chicago
Pile No 1, CP-1, in a squash court underneath the grandstand of Stagg Field
Stadium at the University of Chicago.

On December 2nd,1942, an experiment by Fermi in
the squash court-come-laboratory, proved that it was possible to unlock atomic
energy in a controlled way. Fermi had created the first ever self-sustaining
chain reaction. Szilard, who had worked with Fermi on CP-1, remarked that
"this will go down as a black day in the history of Mankind."
Controlled, this reaction potentially had untold benefits for Mankind.
Uncontrolled, it could unleash awesome power.

In New Mexico, work on an atomic bomb gathered pace. The
team here was lead by Robert Oppenheimer. On July 16th, 1945, the
result of their work was exploded near the research base in Los Alamos.
Ground-zero (directly underneath the bomb) at Alamogordo, just south of Los
Alamos, was turned to glass such was the heat generated by this new type of
bomb. Three weeks later, the "Enola Gay" took off heading for
Hiroshima. When the first bomb was exploded at Alamogordo, Oppenheimer said
"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."